The excitement over the burgeoning information lifecycle management (ILM) trend in the storage industry is having a trickle down affect for smaller companies.

Campbell, Calif.'s OuterBay Monday teamed with Hopkinton, Mass.-based storage giant EMC for a business and technology agreement in which EMC will bundle OuterBay's Application Data Management (ADM) software suite into the ILM technologies it acquired though its purchase of Legato Systems. It will then resell the product as an original equipment manufacturer.

OuterBay's ADM software is database archiving software that shuttles data between storage tiers, ensuring free access to archives across applications, platforms and storage systems. EMC will gain unfettered access to this technology, which will give them added firepower along with the e-mail archiving and content management software it purchased with Legato.

OuterBay's software has the ability to key in specific files in a sea of millions -- a crucial feature for companies wary of audits, said OuterBay Marketing Director Maureen Kelly. With it, users can run a query and get a report on payroll information for a specific amount of years.

Kelly said OuterBay software identifies and migrates "inactive" or legacy data off of production applications and application servers and production databases, and store them in a "live" archive in the case of inactive data and in an encapsulated archive in the case of legacy data. OuterBay products work across heterogeneous applications from PeopleSoft and Oracle and databases including Oracle, DB2, Informix and others.

Enterprise Storage Group analyst Peter Gerr said OuterBay's products help rein in unmanaged data growth within the enterprise. Companies need database archiving software, Gerr told internetnews.com, because capacity continues to be consumed and most organizations don't have a handle on what the data is and what's valuable in case performance is suffering.

EMC customers will benefit from the ability to automatically monitor database performance and usage, all the while moving data among different storage tiers. EMC believes this will help their customers reduce storage costs and improve the performance of their database environments.

"The most successful information lifecycle management strategies will be those that are business-centric and tie closely with key processes and applications," said Mark Sorenson, EMC's Senior Vice President of Information Management Software. "This partnership with Outerbay hits squarely on the center of this critical customer requirement.

The deal is an expansion of an original technology agreement the two companies inked in January 2003, when EMC integrated OuterBay's's LiveArchive solution with EMC's chief ILM piece -- the Centera content addressed storage (CAS) system.

More broadly, the deeper partnership dovetails with EMC's broad ILM strategy to manage data from its inception until its disposal, and should complement archiving products from Legato and content management software from Documentum, should EMC's plan to acquire it succeed. EMC rivals HP and Hitachi Data Systems are also putting together ILM strategies.